


It Is You I Cannot Sacrifice

by shandy_and_champagne



Category: Shadow and Bone (TV), The Grisha Trilogy - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: Alina Starkov is Still a Sun Summoner, Blood Kink, Blood and Torture, Blood and Violence, Dark, Dark Alina Starkov, Dark Magic, Descent into Madness, Grief/Mourning, Human Sacrifice, Madness, Multi, Necromancy, Resurrection, Sacrifice, Soul Bond, This Is Not Going To Go The Way You Think, alina is an amplifier, alina is going to do so much ooc shit so prepare yourself, he will die in all my fics I am not sorry, nikolai is baby, the author once again hates Mal, the major character death was canon anyway, this is going to be so dark and i'm not even sorry
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-18
Updated: 2021-02-18
Packaged: 2021-03-14 00:41:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29534898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shandy_and_champagne/pseuds/shandy_and_champagne
Summary: After The Darkling and Mal died on the Fold, Sankta Alina disappeared. Nikolai sook her out, finding her half-mad, surrounded by books on necromancy and blood rituals."He's gone, Alina," Nikolai said sadly, "Mal's not coming back."She gave him an odd look."Mal?"
Relationships: The Darkling | Aleksander Morozova/Alina Starkov
Comments: 15
Kudos: 63
Collections: Grisha Trilogy





	It Is You I Cannot Sacrifice

**Author's Note:**

> This idea was from my own twitter prompt and desire to see Dark Alina :)
> 
> Disclaimer: Everything belongs to Leigh Bardugo

The Sun Summoner was missing.

The people were starting to notice her absence, starting to wonder if she died on the Fold alongside the Darkling and the tracker. The Apparat had run with it, and Nikolai heard more and more people every day toasting to the martyr, Sankta Alina.

Except Nikolai knew she wasn’t dead.

She had needed time after the battle on the Fold, time away from court, time to heal. Nikolai felt as though he needed it too, but a king could not afford such a luxury. He had taken pity on her, though, sent her off to Novyi zem where she could have time to rest, to escape, before she took on the mantle of Queen of Ravka.

But she hadn’t gone to Novyi zem. She had disappeared at the port, ostensibly gaining passage on another ship. The alternative was she stayed in Os Korvo, or walked back across what was Fold to East Ravka. Nikolai sent out covert scouting parties for her there, hoping beyond hope that she had stayed in Ravka - because the only other place she could have gone was Fjerda, and that was suicide.

Unfortunately, the gossip and spies at court had not been diminished by the ascension of a new king, and after Nikolai had been delivered a worrisome missive from the head of the scout team, it was less than three hours before the Apparat came to the royal chambers with his deepest regrets that the Sun Summoner had not been retrieved from Os Kervo. 

Nikolai gritted his teeth. Alina’s absence had shaken the foundations of trust the people held in him. He needed her by his side if he wanted to start shaping the world. No one would have dared bet against Stormhond, but a bastard boy king was a much more appealing target to manipulate. The vultures were circling.

No one would dare bet against a Saint. He needed her.

Nikolai knew he should feel guilty for being so calculating, but there was no room for lying to one’s self about what was necessary when political stability was at stake. But mostly, as much as Ravka needed her, he missed his friend. Terribly. Since the moment they met, whenever he had envisioned himself doing this job, it had involved her. Bouncing ideas off of one another, arguing about strategies and seating arrangements for parties. Suffering the tedious state dinners and dignitary visits together, complaining into the night afterwards, grasping the other’s hand beneath the table when they had to force a smile. And when they had worked so well together in council meetings, sharing secret smiles over where Vasily was half-asleep, he had realised he would find it very easy to fall in love with her. 

Why would she go to Fjerda? Her face was far too well known for her presence to go unnoticed, her ice-white hair alone would make her a target for the drüskelle. He had promised her he would always let her choose - always give her the option to drop everything and run, to leave them all behind, but he hadn’t thought she would run without a word, without an explanation to her friends. 

Of course, he knew she must have loved Mal, and that murdering him - let alone losing him - had likely shaken her greatly, but to venture into witch hunter territory at a time of unrest? She had to be insane. Or suicidal.

Nikolai cringed inwardly, standing up from his desk to look out the window at where snow was falling thick and fast in the dim illumination from his study. If she had gone to Fjerda in an attempt to harm herself… he couldn’t think of it. But surely that was too elaborate, too far to go for an end she could’ve found here or in Novyi zem. No, she had gone to Fjerda for a reason. Something she needed to know that she couldn’t answer here, something she needed to do that she couldn’t do anywhere else. Alina was strong. Nikolai knew she wouldn’t give up so soon, with so much unfinished. She wouldn’t have gone to one of the most dangerous places for Grisha on the continent for no reason at all.

She was after something. He just didn’t know what.

***

Nikolai sent out another scouting party across the Fjerdan border, covertly seeking out word of the Sun Saint without giving the Fjerdans wind of the intrusion. After two weeks of juggling council meetings and overseeing reparations to the palace, he finally received word that she had been found.

Well, not found per se, no one had actually seen her, but the trackers had uncovered rumours from a Fjerdan village about a strange young girl that lived in the forest, with white hair like a wood sprite. From what he understood from the message, they had tracked her to a clearing in the forest where all signs just… stopped. As though she had vanished into thin air. Nikolai hadn’t even finished reading before he was pulling on his coat and calling for his horse.

He finished the letter while he awaited his riding party and then sent word to his council that he would be taking a week’s absence. The trackers had camped out in the forest, before they turned back in the morning, when, in the early hours of the morning as the moon was descending in the sky, a cabin flickered into view. So briefly and suddenly that the man on watch had thought himself hallucinating. But it happened again at the changeover of shifts, this time witnessed by two men. Upon approaching the clearing, they found some sort of barrier preventing their entry.

Nikolai knew what that meant. The reason they had had such difficulty finding her was the same reason she hadn’t yet been captured by the drüskelle. She had her powers, and she was using them.

***

It took three days of enduring bitter winds and changing horses every twelve hours to reach the Fjerdan forest. Thin, black trees loomed like spiny skeletons over the carpet of snow, and Nikolai felt an eerie chill in the air that had nothing to do with the cold. His men seemed to get a similar impression. Something was wrong here.

Purple dusk skies left the forest dark, illuminated only by the light of their lanterns. When the scouting party and their tents came into view, Nikolai dismounted and strode over to the Captain who bowed in greeting.

“Moi tsar,”

“Captain Kunetsov,” he returned, “What’s the situation?”

The young captain scratched the stubble on his chin and motioned for Nikolai to follow him. Was he mistaken or had he noticed a glint of fear in the man’s eyes? Kunetsov led them to a small clearing in the trees, where the scouts had set up posts around the perimeter. 

“Has there been any change since you sent your report?” Nikolai asked. Travel time meant it had been a week since the message was initially sent.

“She’s not come out, sir, no,” Kunetsov replied, “Although, we have seen the cabin in flickers on occasion, only at night and only for a moment.”

There had not been a great deal to do besides ride and ponder on the trek from Os Alta, and Nikolai had spent long hours considering the immense amount of power it must require to keep an entire cabin invisible at all hours of the day for weeks on end. No sleep, no breaks, no rest. Alina certainly hadn’t run from Ravka because she wanted peace.

“Have you tried to enter the cabin? Or at least speak to her?”

The man actually paled a little at this. “We - we have, sir, but she…”

Nikolai narrowed his eyes at the man, “But she what?”

“She doesn’t want us to, sir,” one of the scouts spoke up.

Nikolai flicked his eyes from the captain’s face to assess the young tracker.

“I thought you said she hasn’t communicated with you.”

The captain cleared his throat uncomfortably, “She hasn’t, sir, but she knows we’re here.”

Nikolai was about to ask how he knew that, when the young lad spoke up again.

“It’s a feeling,” he said, “The closer you get the stronger it is: she doesn’t want nobody going in.”

Naturally, Nikolai’s next move was to see it for himself. The soldiers tried to protest but he gave them a silencing look and headed forward anyway. He was never one to balk from a challenge.

Nikolai could feel it in the air almost immediately as he approached the centre of the clearing. He saw how the soldiers exchanged uneasy glances as they flanked his approach, no sound but the crunch of their boots in the snow. The atmosphere was dense - and the closer they got, the more suffocating it became.

They were ten metres from the centre when they seemed to pass a threshold and a bottomless cold pierced his chest.

Grief.

Pain, suffering, and grief. Endless, heart-wrenching, _soul-splitting_ grief. 

The sheer force of it almost brought him to his knees, and his breath caught in his throat. The men gave similar reactions as they too hit the barrier. She was channelling her anger, her pain and using it to fuel her immense dispensation of power. It was palatable.

There was a darkness, too, it wove between the pulses of pain and tasted bitter in his mouth, raking claws over his back. All of a sudden, Nikolai was reminded of black, inky shadows choking him and blinding him. His humanity was gone, his fingers were claws and his mouth was flooded by the blood of his kill. He was choking on it. It was bitter and coppery and he couldn’t _breathe_ because of it. He clenched his fists and felt resistance as he realised he was clawing up handfuls of snow and dirt, on his knees with no way out, no way up, no escape from the leathery wings that tore from his shoulder blades and split his flesh.

He was being dragged and he was falling. Plummeting out of the sky as the sun pierced the darkness and his wings dissolved, nothing to catch him, nothing to stop him as his bones shattered on the rocks below.

Blood. Blood in his mouth on his hands on his face. He was screaming and scraping at his hands, trying to pull the claws out at the root, trying to wrench his very heart from his chest if it meant he could cut out that dark, horrible nothingness. He was being held down, his face pressed into the ground and he was in the air, falling and falling with no end. He was in the sea. Drowning and being torn apart by the rocks and the current and his wings were dragging him down down down - 

Light.

White, blinding light lit the darkness and dawn broke over the forest. The forest. He was in the forest. In Fjerda. He was on the ground and someone was saying something, a raspy voice calling him again and again.

Nikolai

_Nikolai_

“ _Nikolai_ ,” Alina said again, taking his face forcefully in her cold hands, “Look at me.”

He gasped raggedly in the daylight. Where was he? How long had it been if it was morning already?

“Look at me,” she repeated firmly.

He did. She was… hollow. That was the first word that came to mind. Her eyes were shadowed, her face sickly thin. Her white hair was dull and hung knotted and limp. Her wrists that he circled in his grip were brittle, her arms were twigs. The worn kafta she wore hung loosely off her frame and it didn’t make any sense. Using her powers was meant to replenish her, fuel her. But she was wasting away. She was barely even there. His heart broke for her.

She seemed to realise his rational thoughts had returned and dropped his face abruptly and took a step back, averting her eyes.

“What are you doing here, Nikolai?” her voice was frail from disuse.

He blinked and realised the light wasn’t morning, it was coming from her. The cabin had flickered into existence behind her and it was a broken, draughty-looking thing.

“I -” he started.

She cut him off, “No, actually, I don’t want to know.” She turned her dead eyes on the soldiers behind him who seemed torn between running and pulling their rifles on her. “Leave. Now. There’s nothing for you here.”

“Alina,”

“NO, Nikolai!” she screeched, the chaos of her hair making her look half-mad, “You will _leave_. Leave me be - I don’t want to come back to Ravka. You have to go, you have to _go_.” She wove her fingers into the roots of her hair and yanked, as though she was trying and failing to ground herself. She kept muttering, _leave leave leave leave leave_.

The soldiers were already retreating, eyeing the Saint with distrust. Two men came forward as Alina backed away and made to drag Nikolai back by his arms. After a moment to orient himself he brushed them off and stood.

“I won’t leave you here alone, Alina,” he kept his voice from wavering, trying to catch her eye, “I won’t let you die here.”

She flinched and retreated further back towards the cabin.

“Let me help you,” he pleaded.

She gave a raspy chuckle that rang disjointedly through the air.

“Help me. What could you possibly have to offer me?”

Nikolai responded in the way only a clever fox could: with another question. 

“What do you want?” he asked carefully.

“Nothing you can give me,” she said flatly.

She was mere feet away from slinking back inside the shack and he knew he couldn’t let her disappear again. He had the distinct feeling that if he did, he would not see her again until she drained herself so completely that she lost all control of her power and sense of reality. Until she wasn’t Alina anymore.

“Can I come in?” he blurted. She started to shake her head. “Just to talk,” he reassured her, “I just want to talk to my friend. I’ve missed my friend Alina very dearly.”

She seemed to waver at that and swallowed as she met his eyes. He almost thought he saw a flicker of softness in her expression before the calculated blankness slammed back into place. She closed her eyes and drew the light back to her, plunging the clearing into night once again. She didn’t speak another word, but retreated back into the cabin, leaving the door slightly ajar.

Nikolai hesitated a moment, turning to look at where the scout team and his riding party stood wearily behind him. They seemed inclined to stop him from following her but he knew this was an opportunity he wouldn’t get again. If he could only get Alina to open up, to let him help, then he might be able to draw her back onto the right side of the living.

“If I don’t come out after half an hour, I grant you permission to come in after me,” he said to the head of his guard, “Not a minute sooner.”

The man nodded, but was clearly uncomfortable letting his charge enter a small, enclosed space with a powerful and half-deranged woman that could slice the heads of mountains with the stroke of a hand.

Nikolai admitted to himself that a similar thought had indeed crossed his mind - he couldn’t take the same risks now as he could when he was Sturmhond - he wasn’t dispensable anymore. But he had to have faith that Alina wouldn’t hurt him, she was still herself - if a little derailed. He was certain of it.

He kept telling himself that as he crossed the distance to the door, noting the distinct absence of the repulsion he had experienced earlier. He slipped into the cabin and quietly closed the door behind him.

The room was lit by candles, burning low in their holders and interspersed with flickering embers of her own light. The cabin walls were bare wood, the cracks in the floorboards letting icy slithers of winter air seep through, making the flames flicker. There was hardly any furniture in the room - a small rotten table pushed up to the far wall, piled in empty tins, preserves, what looked like salt and a bowl of melting ice. No bed.

Alina herself was sat cross-legged on the floor, looking for all the world like she had forgotten he was there. She was bent over a thick tome, nose almost touching the page, and several other volumes lay open around her, corners folded and scraps of paper lodged in the pages as makeshift bookmarks. That was something she had no shortage of, it seemed - piles of paper and ink pots sat in the middle of the room, and sheets and sheets of her notes and drawings and scribblings were already scattered about her haphazardly. There were all kinds of bizarre symbols etched onto the pages, some of them had been written again and again over several sheets, like a prayer or a curse. 

The dark ink made him uneasy. He scratched at the back of his neck to dispel the feeling of something... breathing behind him. The prickle of a thousand eyes watching him from those runes.

Careful not to disturb her arrangement, or show any hint of just how much her strange behaviour scared him, Nikolai approached her slowly and sat down on a scrap of bare floor, trying to inconspicuously look over her shoulder at what she was reading.

“It’s in Fjerdan?” he remarked before he could stop himself. Alina couldn’t read Fjerdan. Could she?

Without moving her eyes from the page, she gestured to the second, smaller book she had open in front of her and he realised it was a translation aid from Fjerdan to Ravkan. He gingerly reached out to the book closest to him and, making sure to keep the page marked, turned it to read the inscription on the cover.

He snatched his hand back, instinctively, hissing through his teeth as he recoiled, putting as much distance between himself and the book as possible. There was a darkness seeping out of the book, but that was nothing compared to what the words he just read had done to him.

_The Art of Necromancy: Death and the World Beyond_

He stared at Alina in horror, watching her as she barely moved from her crouched position over the book. She looked like a corpse.

He scanned the notes scattered about and found what he could make sense of chilled him to the bone.

_When one considers the methods for resurrection…_

_...willing sacrifice…_

_...summoner performs the necessary blood rituals…_

_...soul-bonded partners can tie one another to life…_

_...bonded amplifiers…_

He dropped the paper he was holding.

“Alina?” He didn’t know what to say. It was clear now. The grief, the darkness, the way she was so drained by so much power.

She barely even acknowledged he had spoken.

Nikolai wracked his brain for what to do - anything, anything to stop this. He crouched in front of her and said again, more gently this time, “Alina.”

When he was met with more silence, he tentatively put a hand on her bony shoulder. She tensed, but didn’t move.

“You need to stop this,” he said sadly, “He’s gone, Alina.”

She clenched her jaw and stared determinedly at the page. Her arms wrapped more tightly around her stomach as though she was holding her organs inside. His heart broke for her all over again.

“I'm sorry, sweetheart,” he murmured, “Mal’s not coming back.”

She looked up at him sharply and he let his hand drop. Her eyes had seemed to fill with life again, as though she had been forcefully broken from her dazed state. But the strange expression on her face looked more like confusion than anger, and her hoarse voice was tainted with bewilderment.

“Mal?”

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you thought of this chapter! Your comments give me motivation to write more :D


End file.
